PRIZES

Mark Edward and Stephen Farrier

This is a productively wide-ranging collection that makes a significant contribution to the field through its breadth of approach, which includes detailed attention to particular artists and practices, intersectional perspectives, and valuable work on queer Asian artists. The essays are consistently thoughtful, well theorised, lively and engaged with current debates, and the selection demonstrates careful and inclusive curation.

The collection’s particular strength lies in the texture and variety of its examples and in its openness to disobedience, resistance and alternative ways of thinking about academic practice. It is a rich collection which bravely and rigorously examines the contexts outside mainstream drag performance to appraise and decolonise contemporary drag practice. The pinnacle of the editorial work in this collection is in its ability to demonstrate that each chapter connects through a deep response and critique of existing feminists and queer frameworks within which drag scholarship currently tends to sit, arguing that drag is not just a space to be held creatively, or a queer practice to be studied, but a core critical framework and a field in itself.

Eirini Kartsaki

Obsessions of a Showwoman: The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky, Intellect Books, 2024.

Dassia N. Posner, Claudia Orenstein, Alissa Mello

Making Meaning in Puppetry: Materials, Practice, Perception, Routledge, 2026.

PRIZES

Clare Finburgh Delijani (with Christian Biet)

A New History of Theatre in France, Cambridge University Press, 2024.

Clare Finburgh Delijani’s A New History of Theatre in France is an outstanding achievement in theatre historiography and an invaluable contribution to both theatre and performance studies and modern languages. This updated and comprehensive English-language reference work offers a vital rethinking of French-language theatre on the territory of what is today France, bridging disciplinary and linguistic divides with remarkable clarity and insight. This is an invaluable publication for the field: ambitious in scope, elegant in execution, and transformative in its potential impact.

Tracy Davis and Paul Rae

The Cambridge Guide to Mixed Methods Research for Theatre and Performance Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2024.

PRIZES

Nesreen N. Hussein

Co-Editors: Kevin Brown, Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt

‘Decolonisation and Performance Studies’, Global Performance Studies, vol. 5, nos. 1–2, 2022

A stunning demonstration of coalitional authorship and curation, “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” broadens research agendas in the field around the epistemological exclusions created by capitalist empire. Attentive to the material conditions that both constrain and enable knowledge production in globally uneven ways, this special double issue performs what it champions: privileging modes of academic writing suited to transnational conversation and committing to de-center the English language in Theatre and Performance Studies. At a historical moment marked by the resurgence of genocidal violence in Palestine, “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” is a testament to how the field is grappling with settler colonialism and a stark reminder of all that there is still to do.

Sean Metzger and Roberta Mock

The Methuen Drama Handbook of Gender and Theatre. London: Bloomsbury, 2024.

Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier, Manola-Gayatri Kumarswamy

What’s Queer About Queer Performance Now? Contemporary Theatre Review, Volume 33, Issue 1-2 (2023)

PRIZES

Amy Mihyang Ginther

Stages of Reckoning: Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training. London: Routledge, 2022.

It is with great joy that we announce Stages of Reckoning Antiracist and Decolonial Actor Training as the winner of the TaPRA Prize for Edited Collections. This is a joyous, urgent and heartfelt book which invites the reader in with care offering a challenge and a call to take action. It is a sensitively curated collection, which carefully situates and critiques actor training within existing hegemonies of whiteness and coloniality. It creates a space in which a conversation about the needs of Global Majority acting students are placed at the centre. It names and acknowledges the additional labour, effort and work required by these students and questions and challenges this experience. The book offers exciting and challenging discussions and considerations of pedagogy for the field as a whole. In particular we wish to commend the editor for their considered acts of editorial care and support extended to the contributors, placing special consideration to the writing conditions of the contributors. This book epitomises the TaPRA manifesto.

Julia Listengarten and Yana Meerzo

Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation. London: Bloomsbury, 2021

Martin Middeke and Martin Riedelsheimer

Critical Theatre Ecologies special issue, Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 10.1 (2022)

WINNING

TBC

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